In December 1763, the “Paxton Boys,” a vigilante group of white settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier, killed and scalped six Conestoga Indians living under the colonial government’s protection on a contested tract of land. Two weeks later, the vigilantes rode into neighboring Lancaster and shot, scalped, and dismembered 14 more Conestoga—three elderly men, three women, and eight children—living in a provincial workhouse under the auspices of the local government. The men celebrated in town, “hooping and hallowing” and firing their guns. There were dozens of witnesses, but no one interfered; one resident opined that “too many approved of the massacre.” In February, 200 Paxton Boys and their allies marched to Philadelphia, a three-day journey, to protest the colonial government’s failure to defend them against Indian attacks, rebuking the governor, “You peacefully drink your tea and coffee etc., live carefree, and we have to stand constantly at the ready on the borders expecting to be destroyed by Indians.”
Colin G. Calloway, a history professor at Dartmouth, has written extensively about the tangled relations between Native Americans and European colonists. In his aptly titled Hard Neighbors, Calloway turns his gaze toward the violent, contested borderlands of the early American frontier and, in particular, the Native people’s primary antagonists, the Scotch-Irish, “a population of white frontiersmen who cut a bloody swath through Indian country and were often the cutting edge of the colonial dispossession of Native people.” The Paxton Boys, Calloway writes, saw themselves as “the front line of frontier defense and the last line of frontier justice.” The so-called Paxton riots were not merely violent retribution toward Native Americans but also a protest against provincial elites in Philadelphia, and against the imperial government, which they believed pandered to their adversaries, even as it failed to protect settlers from Indian attacks.
At its core, Hard Neighbors is a story about a collision of cultures, and a government’s failure to defend its citizenry. Calloway explores the ways in which border conflicts not only forged American history but also shaped the Scotch-Irish themselves, whose cultural and political influence continues to this day.
Hard Neighbors depicts a harsh and gruesome history, mythologized in popular culture and broadly familiar to even casual armchair historians: tribal abductions of white women; the burning of Indian villages in retribution; the torching of settlers’ crops; the scalping and dismemberment of victims for bounties; and the signing and then betrayal of peace treaties. Calloway fills in these broad outlines with deeply researched histories, offering a densely detailed chronology of violent encounters and shifting alliances, set against a backdrop of clashing colonial empires and the territorial sprawl of a young nation.
At the center of the conflict were the Scotch-Irish, Presbyterians of meager means who emigrated to America in the 18th century, lured by the promise of free land. Colonial governments throughout North America sought out immigrants—notably Germans, as well as the more numerous and bellicose Scotch-Irish—explicitly intended to settle along their colonies’ loosely defined western borders, thereby creating a buffer zone between Indian tribes and the settled interior and coastal towns. The Scotch-Irish were thought to be particularly desirable as border settlers, since their Scottish forefathers had a history of acting as buffers—they themselves had been lured to Ireland in the 17th century by Queen Elizabeth I and King James I, in an attempt to quell the Catholic “barbaric Irish.”
Some colonies offered generous enticements. South Carolina, for example, offered free passage, 50 acres of land, tools, temporary tax exemptions, and a year’s provisions. The campaign was remarkably successful—by the eve of the American Revolution, Scotch-Irish colonists had created 500 settlements tracing the Appalachian Mountains, extending 1,500 miles from Maine to Georgia.
In the early years of the new republic, Federalist administrations endeavored to restore peace on the frontier. But for the Scotch-Irish, decades of violent conflict had hardened into a culture of hatred for Indians and a squatters’ sense of frontier justice and entitlement to Native lands.
Contrary to governmental promises, much of the frontier was not “free” but contested, and new arrivals squatted on property claimed by others, ignoring legal claims and surveyors’ studies, and antagonizing local Indian tribes. James Logan, a colonial official in Pennsylvania, came to rue his role in encouraging Scotch-Irish settlement on the frontier, writing in 1731, “Great Numbers of wilful people from the North of Ireland [have] over-run all the back parts of the Province as far as the Susquehannah and are now to the further disaffection of the Indians, passing over it.” They were, he regretted, “troublesome to the government and hard neighbors to the Indians.”
Nor were they particularly good settlers—the Scotch-Irish proved itinerant, journeying along river valleys and reversing course when they encountered Indigenous resistance. Many arrived in the backcountry so impoverished that they had no resources to invest in housing, tools, seed, or livestock.
In the first decades of the 18th century, Native Americans and Scotch-Irish interests often converged and the communities coexisted, trading, working side by side, and intermarrying. The Scotch-Irish learned Indian methods of hunting and agriculture, and paddled canoes. Some adopted Native dress and lived in crude bark or log houses.
Eastern elites looked down on the Scotch-Irish, viewing them as excessively assimilated with their Native neighbors, and routinely decried them as “white Natives.” George Washington, who earned his military bona fides on the frontier, described the Scotch-Irish as “a Parcel of Barbarians and an Uncouth Set of People.” Provincial Secretary Richard Peters mused that the frontier might be more safely inhabited by the colony’s Iroquois allies than by “the lower sort of People who are exceedingly loose and ungovernable.”
Proximity led to alliances and cooperation, but also conflict, particularly over land. Calloway notes, “Borderlands and frontiers may be zones of flux where identities become blurred, but they can also be places where identities form and harden.” The Scotch-Irish were expected to serve as “expendable defensive barriers,” protecting eastern elites and settled farming and coastal communities from Indian attacks and, over time, from French Catholics and slave rebellions.
This settler colonialism served the distant agendas of eastern elites and the British monarchy, rather than the immediate interests of Scotch-Irish communities. Frontiersmen were expected to serve in militias to fight in Indian wars but frequently deserted, fearful of leaving their homes and families unprotected. Governments, Calloway notes wryly, “outsourced the dirty work of empire building” to the Scotch-Irish.
Global forces far beyond the frontier brought Native American and settler relations to the boiling point. The clash between the French and British colonial powers that ignited the French and Indian War (1754–63) began on the North American frontier. Indian tribes allied with the French raided British settlements, burning houses, torturing settlers, and kidnapping women and children. By 1756, Indian raiders had killed more than 1,000 colonial soldiers and frontiersmen, and settlers had fled nearly 30,000 square miles of territory.
Backcountry settlers like the Paxton Boys fought back, sometimes adopting Native styles of warfare, including scalping and the use of tomahawks. Outflanked, settlers begged for assistance, sending petitions to their governors asking for arms and ammunition. Settlers in Pennsylvania described their situation as “Lamentably Dangerous.” They feared for their lives, “being in such imminent Peril of being inhumanely Butchered by our Savage neighbours.” When the Quaker legislature responded that the Scotch-Irish must defend themselves, 100 settlers, “naked and defenceless,” petitioned the king, to no avail. Instead, the governor placed bounties on Indian scalps as a way to encourage disheartened settlers to remain in the backcountry and fight, rather than flee the contested territory. A group of frontiersmen drove a wagonload of frozen corpses—among the 47 settlers slaughtered by Delaware warriors—and laid them before the statehouse in protest. Calloway explains, “They saw themselves as a beleaguered people left to fight for themselves by a distant government.”
For the Scotch-Irish, who served as the tip of the spear, the French and Indian War was a formative experience. Years of coexistence with local tribes, dotted with periodic conflict, were replaced by an era of unrelenting violence and a hostility toward Native Americans. The shared atrocities of warfare and fear of Indian attacks bonded communities, created tight kinship networks, and built a folk culture in which they viewed themselves as both victims and heroes. After a decade bearing the military burden on the western frontier with little support from colony or king, the Scotch-Irish settlers developed a suspicion of authority and outsiders, antipathy toward government, and enthusiasm for the mounting demands for independence.
In the early years of the new republic, Federalist administrations endeavored to restore peace on the frontier, penning treaties to establish relations with Native nations, and planning for an orderly, titled national expansion. But for the Scotch-Irish, who had spent decades embroiled in violent conflict, the political exigencies of the French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars had hardened into a culture of hatred for Indians and a squatters’ sense of frontier justice and entitlement to Native lands. Calloway writes, “The language of savagism that angry Scotch-Irish on the mid-Atlantic frontier had employed in the midst of a brutal war became part of the everyday talk of white Americans, justifying dispossession.”
Scotch-Irish hostility toward elites and authority persisted, exemplified in the Whiskey Rebellion, a series of skirmishes in response to an excise tax intended to help pay for Revolutionary War debts. Along the frontier, where whisky was the most important item of trade, the tax infuriated backcountry settlers as both an attack on their income and a reminder of the government’s ongoing failure to protect them against the Indians. In 1794, 31 years after the Paxton Boys had marched on Philadelphia, 7,000 settlers from throughout Appalachia marched on Pittsburgh, threatening to burn the city occupied by cultural elites, wealthy merchants, and land speculators. In a massive show of force, President George Washington sent an army of 13,000 militia to quell the rebellion.
By the early 19th century, the descendants of the Scotch-Irish had found a political and cultural home with the Jeffersonian Republicans and, later, Jacksonian Democrats, who embraced settlers’ role as active participants in national expansion and land appropriation, and hostility toward Native tribes.
Hard Neighbors is a scholarly book, well researched, deeply documented, and set in the colonial and early American past. The author’s explicit aim—which he achieves admirably—is to detail the complexity of relations between Native Americans and the Scotch-Irish, and break down monolithic notions of “white colonists” and “European settlers.” Calloway makes only the most glancing allusions to current events. And yet, in the shadow of the 2024 election, it’s hard not to hear echoes of present-day politics. And for amateur readers of history, probing this sort of connective tissue can prove deeply satisfying.
The Scotch-Irish sound curiously like the cultural strain of MAGA: “a reputation for fierce independence, clannishness, a touchy sense of honor, eye-for-an-eye standards of justice, defiance of authority, dislike of elitism, a populist version of democracy, a strong military tradition, and general combativeness.”
Calloway’s Scotch-Irish settlers are the literal forefathers of J. D. Vance’s Appalachian hillbillies, eulogized in his best-selling memoir. When Calloway describes the personal characteristics of the Scotch-Irish, borne from years of hard frontier living under threat of Indian attack and abandoned by the provincial government, they sound curiously like the cultural strain of MAGA: “a reputation for fierce independence, clannishness, a touchy sense of honor, eye-for-an-eye standards of justice, defiance of authority, dislike of elitism, a populist version of democracy, a strong military tradition, and general combativeness.”
The vigilante Paxton Boys bear more than a passing resemblance to today’s Proud Boys, and the events of January 6 recall settlers’ own theatrical demands for provincial support and defense on the grounds of the Pennsylvania capitol. When the Scotch-Irish expressed terror in the light of gruesome Indian attacks and resentment over contested hunting and farmlands, it is easy to hear echoes of Americans today along the U.S.-Mexico border, begging for government aid in enforcing safety, providing essential public services, and supporting economic well-being. Indeed, Governor Greg Abbott’s deportation of 100,000 migrants from Texan border towns to northern sanctuary cities mirrors settlers’ angry refusals to serve as their government’s “tip of the spear.”
It’s not a perfect analogy, of course—today the much-maligned “incursion” is by Latin Americans and other immigrants of color, while in the nation’s formative years, white European settlers were the immigrants, invading Native lands. And while Donald Trump has made the invidious criminality of immigrants central to his political identity (even as data on crimes committed by immigrant groups belies the argument), it is a poor parallel for the colonial and early American frontier, where white settlers faced genuine peril from Indian tribes. But while the actual threats may not be equivalent, the rhetoric surrounding the existential threat of the “other” is remarkably similar. Calloway’s history serves as a cautionary tale of how fractious relations with other ethnic and racial groups—especially on the border—can boomerang with resentments toward the government for failing to protect its citizens.
